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As the integrity and extent of many natural ecosystems continues to decline, the concept of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) is gaining traction as a means to reverse such trends. However, uptake of an NbS approach across society is often piecemeal or partial. This paper argues that a deeper connection with the literature on transformations will help realise the full potential of NbS for enabling sustainable futures. Whilst others have already noted the concept of transformations to be relevant to NbS, many insights from the sustainability transformations literature remain underutilised by those working with NbS.In this paper, we provide a conceptual framework to enable more ambitious and widespread uptake of NbS. We do this by identifying and drawing on key conceptual perspectives and frameworks from the sustainability transformations literature. This framework identifies key components (current system, future visions, process and an iterative approach) to consider when planning strategic actions. The framework strengthens the links between transformations and NbS concepts for a variety of stakeholders: as well as guiding NbS practitioners, it can also support action-orientated research to help steer NbS to achieve transformational change.

Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) and ecosystem restoration are often conflated, but cannot be assumed to be identical. Understanding and choosing between these different framings is important. It affects our ambitions for reinvigorating natural systems, the range of actors and resources that can be drawn on to achieve them, and every part of how interventions are planned, delivered and appraised.To explore the differences and relationships between NbS and restoration we focus on freshwater catchment management initiatives, but our points are relevant to initiatives in other settings or framed in other terms. We firstly identify the potential differences by analysing accepted definitions of restoration and Nature-Based Solutions; and we then illustrate these with examples of catchment management in UK and Ireland, with which we are familiar from our own work and collaborations.These real-world cases demonstrate that the framings of restoration and NbS can lead to different priorities for how ecosystems and natural processes are managed; and who is involved and how projects develop. The cases also show that interventions may be somewhere on a continuum somewhere in between the two concepts, and potentially shift over time. There is often a lack of clarity over why these terms are used, causing sometimes unacknowledged confusion and potentially missed opportunities to improve catchment management.Different stakeholder groups involved in catchment management could benefit from more opportunity to explicitly reflect on preferred goals, and the implications for how to achieve this. We need more explicit reflection on the purpose of an intervention, and then different actors from site-managers to policy and other enabling groups can plan to achieve that vision. Given the time lags between interventions and outcomes, it is particularly important to use these insights in adaptive approaches to understand the changing drivers shaping current and future action.

Regional patterns of rainfall are changing around the world, putting pressure on social, economic, and environmental systems, and changing the outlook for food, water, and health security. This is the case in the Tempisque-Bebedero River Basin (TBRB), located on the Pacific slope of northwest Costa Rica, which relies heavily on water resources for tourism, agriculture, ranching, and fish farming. In this study, we use non-stationary extreme value analysis to characterize the climatic drivers of extreme precipitation in the TBRB. Daily extreme precipitation events at stations across the TBRB are selected using a peak-above-threshold approach, and interannual climate variability is included as time-varying covariates in a non-stationary point process model, using three regional climate indices: the Caribbean Low-Level Jet (CLLJ) index, the Oceanic Niño Index (ONI), representative of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) index. We find that the magnitude and frequency of precipitation extremes in the basin are driven by the CLLJ and the AMO. The ONI is only a significant driver of extreme precipitation in the northwestern region of the basin. This is likely because ENSO controls the strength of the CLLJ, thus the dominant impact of ENSO on precipitation in the TBRB may be incorporated within the CLLJ component of our model.

Abstract Background Walking is a simple activity that could help to reduce the prevalence of chronic diseases in all populations. Furthermore, an inverse dose–response relationship exists between steps taken and risk of premature death and cardiovascular events in middle-aged and older adults. There is a lack of information on how to effectively engage older adults around retirement age in walking. This qualitative study explored attitudes towards walking in older people with regard to habits, intensity, preferences and strategies for increasing walking behaviour. Methods In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 26 older adults who were either close to retirement or recently retired. An inductive thematic analysis was conducted. Results Three themes were identified from the data; 1) Engagement and perceived value of walking; was focused on the meaning of walking for the participant and the attributes they associate with their walking practice. 2) Integration and connectivity of walking; was focused on how participants integrate walking in their daily lives and whether walking can be practiced as a viable means of connectivity. 3) Strategies to increase walking; was focused on what factors motivate participants in their walking practice and what strategies they perceived to be beneficial to increase walking distance and intensity at an individual level. Discussion The views of walking in people of retirement age were represented within 3 key themes. The factors contained in these themes that may influence future walking practice are discussed with regard to future strategies to promote walking in the retirement life change. Conclusion It may be beneficial to promote qualitative aspects of walking practice and strive for regularity rather than intensity of walking to accrue the social, psychological and intellectual benefits reported by individuals in the retirement life change.

Whether pursuing the breadth of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals or delivering joined-up approaches within a single environmental domain, policy objectives, policy design and policy implementation should cohere vertically and horizontally. However, policy coherence remains a challenge to implement. The limited empirical scholarship on policy coherence tends to focus on policy documentation and/or the outcomes, with little attention to individual agency or social processes involved. Furthermore, there is little discussion of the normative dimensions of policy coherence and the political aspects of individual agency, indicating the need for political ecology. We conducted an empirical study within four UK catchment (watershed) partnerships, using critical interpretive policy analysis to enrich the interface between political ecology and environmental policy. We explored who practices policy coherence and how; what motivates those investing their energy into these practices; their constraints and the contradictions arising. We found that the appetite and ability to support policy coherence depends on individual agency as much as partnership structures, which are themselves situated in technocratic regimes of policy implementation. Within these regimes, agents presented as apolitical and enabling, making it challenging to research the political and social processes of policy coherence. A political ecology lens highlights how power is involved in these voluntary initiatives, potentially shoring up existing privilege inscribed into riparian habitats and their resources. Our contribution therefore responds to and amplifies the critique of traditional presentations of integrated water resource management devoid of politics.

Introduction: The dynamics of terrestrial vegetation are shifting globally due to environmental changes, with potential repercussions for the proper functioning of the Earth system. However, the response of global vegetation, and the variability of the responses to their changing environment, is highly variable. In addition, the study of such changes and the methods used to monitor them, have in of themselves, been found to significantly impact the findings.Methods: This research builds on a recently developed vegetation persistence metric, which is simple to use, is user‐controlled to assess levels of statistical significance, and is readily reproducible, all designed to avoid these potential pitfalls. This study uses this vegetation persistence metric to present a global exploration of vegetation responses to climatic, latitudinal, and land‐use changes at a biomes level across three decades (1982–2010) of seasonal vegetation activity via the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI).Results: Results demonstrated that positive vegetation persistence was found to be greater in June, July, August (JJA), and September, October, November (SON), with an increasing vegetation persistence found in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) over the Southern Hemisphere (SH). While vegetation showed positive persistence overall, this was not constant across all studied biomes. Overall forested biomes along with mangroves showed positive responses towards enhanced vegetation persistence in both the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere. Contrastingly, desert, xeric shrubs, and savannas exhibited no significant persistence patterns, but the grassland biomes showed more negative persistence patterns and much higher variability over seasons, compared to the other biomes. The main drivers of changes appear to relate to climate, with tropical biomes linking to the availability of seasonal moisture, whereas the northern hemisphere forested biomes are driven more by temperature. Grasslands respond to moisture also, with high precipitation seasonality driving the persistence patterns. Land-use change also affected biomes and their responses, with many biomes having been significantly impacted by humans such that the vegetation response matched land use and not biome type.Discussion: The use here of a novel statistical time series analysis of NDVI at a pixel level, and looking historically back in time, highlights the utility and power of such techniques within global change studies. Overall, the findings match greening trends of other research but within a finer scale both temporally and spatially which is a critical new development in understanding global vegetation shifts.

Abstract Background Community-based conservation (CBC) promotes the idea that long-term conservation success requires engaging with, and providing benefits for local communities. Though widespread, CBC projects are not always successful or free of controversy. With criticisms on all sides of the conservation debates, it is critical to have a better understanding of (1) whether CBC is an effective conservation tool, and (2) of the factors associated with the success or failure of CBC projects, and the scale at which these factors operate. Recent CBC reviews have typically examined only a single resource domain, have limited geographic scope, consider only one outcome, or ignore the nested nature of socioecological systems. To remedy these issues, we use a newly coded global comparative database of CBC projects identified by systematic review to evaluate success in four outcome domains (attitudes, behaviors, ecological, economic) and explore synergies and tradeoffs among these outcomes. We test hypotheses about how features of the national context (H-NC), project design (H-PD), and local community characteristics (H-CC) affect these four measures of success. Methods To add to a sample of 62 projects that we used from previous systematic reviews, we systematically searched the conservation literature using six terms in four online databases. To increase the number of projects for each country in order to conduct a multilevel analysis, we also conducted a secondary search using the Advancing Conservation in a Social Context online library. We coded projects for 65 pieces of information. We conducted bivariate analyses using two-dimensional contingency tables and proportional odds logistic regression and conducted multivariate analyses by fitting reduced form proportional odds logistic regression models that were selected using a forward stepwise AIC approach. Results The primary and secondary searches produced 74 new projects to go along with the 62 projects from previous reviews for a total of 136 projects. The analyses suggest that project design, particularly capacity building in local communities, is critical in generating success across all outcomes. In addition, some community characteristics, such as tenure regimes and supportive cultural beliefs and institutions, are important for some aspects of project success. Surprisingly, there is less evidence that national context systematically influences project outcomes. Conclusions Our study supports the idea that conservation projects should be carefully designed to be effective and that some characteristics of local communities can facilitate success. That well-designed projects can prevail over disadvantages relating to the pre-existing national and local context is encouraging. As the evidence base on CBC grows, it will be useful to repeat this analysis with additional search terms, and consider additional variables related to national context to further evaluate the role of broader socio-political and economic contexts.